The New York Times launches .onion site

The New York Times announced the launch of a TOR-only version of their website.

The New York Times reports on stories all over the world, and our reporting is read by people around the world. Some readers choose to use Tor to access our journalism because they’re technically blocked from accessing our website; or because they worry about local network monitoring; or because they care about online privacy; or simply because that is the method that they prefer.

You can access the experimental website through this URL, but only if you're using TOR browser, Orbot, or other TOR-enabled clients and browsers:

https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion

With this experiment, The New York Times joins other organizations that have their own official TOR websites such as ProPublica and Facebook.

The TOR version of the New York Times was made using the Enterprise Onion Toolkit[1], a tool which aims to easily give a .onion address to public websites, effectively creating a "man in the middle" HTTPS proxy.

Making a .onion address for your website can have positive effects for your readership using TOR for privacy reasons, whethere it is because of local network or state-level surveillance. Indeed, compared to the access through a TOR exit node, .onion websites offer a higher speed and less bandwidth contention.